"We cannot resurrect the dead. What we can do and what we must do is re-examine ourselves. Jews
should begin not by screaming, 'While they're murdering six million Jews, the
Gentiles stood idly by.' They should say, 'We stood idly by.'

You couldn’t
have stopped the massacre. You could have slowed the massacre. You could have
made it an inefficient massacre. The people who made it efficient were the
Allies who didn’t interfere. And the people who didn’t urge them to interfere
were the [American] Jews.

Most
Americans—even many American Jews—believe that we didn’t know. Many assume that
we couldn’t have done anything even if we had known. Meet Peter Bergson!

Until
1941, Nazi Germany had persecuted and sought to expel the Jews. But the doors of
the West had remained closed to them. It was in 1942 that the free nations of the
world faced a new Nazi policy: mass murder of the Jews of Europe.

A
Palestinian Jew who had served with the nationalist Irgun
organization in pre-Israel Palestine, Peter Bergson (born Hillel Kook,
1915-2001), had come to the U.S. in 1940. In America, this firebrand led what
came to be known as the Bergson Group, whose strenuous efforts from 1942 to 1945
underscore just how much was known—and how much was attempted during those difficult
years.

Vilified
at the time—American Jewish leader Rabbi Stephen Wise reportedly characterized
him as “equally as great an enemy of the Jews as Hitler,” while others
maligned the group as fascist or terrorist—Bergson remains a controversial yet
still
relatively obscure figure in the history of America and the Holocaust. Not Idly
By provides the riveting first-hand testimony of the charismatic
and eloquent Bergson, who comments on the response to the crisis by non-European
Jews and describes his determined efforts to fight the Holocaust: the innovative and provocative full-page
political ads in major newspapers, the fiery 1943 Ben Hecht/Kurt Weill
pageant We Will Never Die (Madison Square Garden, Hollywood Bowl)—heard extensively for the first
time since 1943!—the rabbis’ march in Washington before Yom
Kippur 1943, the creation
of various activist committees and the energetic and productive lobbying of
American government officials that ultimately helped lead to the establishment
at last of a U.S. rescue agency, the War Refugee Board.

This is
a one-sided view of those times: Peter Bergson’s! Not Idly By draws exclusively on the full, passionate interview Bergson granted to filmmaker Laurence Jarvik for the latter’s
ground-breaking
1982 documentary Who Shall Live and Who shall Die?, as well as on the
unused interview shot by Claude Lanzmann in 1978 for his epic 1985 Shoah.

Has Peter Bergson's time come at last?
With his help, can we break through the taboos that shroud the American
experience—and
the American Jewish experience—of
that challenging time in history? Do Americans—Jewish and non-Jewish—not
need to consider and probe further our share of responsibility in the massacre
of the Jews of Europe? So many years later, are we at last willing to probe not only what happened here then, but our many evasions today about that experience? If we do not fully and forthrightly—and without smugness—acknowledge and dissect our share in past failures, are we not limiting our ability to act effectively in meeting the challenges today and tomorrow?

Sauvage
is best known for his acclaimed feature documentary Weapons of the Spirit, being rereleased in 2017 in a newly remastered 2017 edition. That film tells the story of the unique “conspiracy of goodness” that occurred in a tiny Christian area of France
that defied the Nazis and turned itself into the very haven of refuge that
America refused to be: in and around the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in
France, 5,000 Jews found shelter, including Pierre, who was born there. At
the Holocaust commemoration at the U.S. Capitol in 2009, President
Barack Obama invoked the example of Le Chambon to encourage Americans to "strive
each day, both individually and as a nation, to be among the righteous."SauvageZ

Sauvage's own life has thus inescapably taught him
that collective will and action can be startlingly imaginative and dynamic even
under the most trying circumstances. Where there's a will there is indeed
often a way.

For over thirty years the Chambon Foundation's mission has been "to communicate and explore the necessary
lessons of hope intertwined with the Holocaust's unavoidable lessons of
despair." The Varian Fry Institute was founded as a division of the
Chambon Foundation to explore and communicate the American experience of
the Holocaust.